Thread by @bitjson

Congrats on the 2023 upgrade, Bitcoin Cash! 🎉

Beginning with block #792773 (000000000000000002fc0cdadaef1857bbd2936d37ea94f80ba3db4a5e8353e8), $BCH supports #CashTokens, future-proof multiparty vaults (P2SH32), and several non-breaking technical improvements to TX validation.

Having proposed and maintained the CashTokens CHIP, I'd like specifically thank the node teams at @bitcoincashnode, @SoftwareVerde, @FloweeTheHub, @KnuthNode, and @BitcoinUnlimit for their deep technical reviews, contributions, and implementations.

Thank you also to the 18 individual contributors to the CHIP, the ~50 of companies, organizations, and other stakeholders who provided public statements on the CHIP, and the hundreds of stakeholders who reviewed it prior to lock-in:

https://twitter.com/bitjson/status/1590715788495032320

For a deep-dive on some of the technical landscape of Bitcoin Cash and implications of CashTokens, check out @TheBCHPodcast #79:

https://twitter.com/TheBCHPodcast/status/1657298246551707649

In the rest of this thread, I'll describe CashTokens and why I think they're an important tool for expanding financial access and protecting human rights.

CashTokens are digital assets with the censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer, low-fee properties of Bitcoin Cash. They can be issued by anyone, and they can both represent physical assets and directly serve as currencies, payment stablecoins, commodities, securities, ...

... debt instruments, gift cards, receipts, event tickets, and more. The underlying technology also enables far more advanced on-chain applications like higher-security vaults, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and bridged sidechains. E.g. an auction DEX:

https://twitter.com/bitjson/status/1542578372118724608

Ethereum developers can think of Bitcoin Cash as featuring transaction-level sharding of both data and execution, account abstraction, deterministic gas pricing, all-or-nothing transaction chaining, zero-delay re-spending, a wider selection of MEV-resistance strategies, ...

... and no-fee contract deployment – user wallets both “deploy” and “destroy” contracts incrementally as part of their usage, improving overall network throughput and real-world privacy. All of this exists at “layer 1”, with exceptionally low-bandwidth transactions, ...

... low-resource archival nodes, ever-improving scalability (already 25,000 transactions per second on modest, 2020 hardware), ...

https://twitter.com/FloweeTheHub/status/1320363107118698496

... and multiple strategies for “layer 2” systems if needed (e.g. Lightning Network would be more bandwidth-efficient on Bitcoin Cash than on BTC).

https://twitter.com/bitjson/status/1361717127569358849

Financial freedom is increasingly the foundation on which other freedoms rest; the right to assemble, peacefully protest, a fair trial, etc. – these offer little protection if you can be instantly excluded from working or buying food when you exercise those rights.

Globally, special interests seek to impose Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and extend their control over all transactions, jeopardizing human rights on a previously-impossible scale.

At the same time, recent events have revealed systemic failures in some of the same institutions that led Satoshi to work on peer-to-peer money in 2008.

Even outside of our ecosystem, reasonable people share our concerns with centralized money. Our neighbors need alternatives now more than ever, and we can show them how free, fair, and resilient money works. Keep building.

https://twitter.com/BTCTN/status/1653446098613043201